5/18/2005 @ 5:53PM

Salty Trump Decries Freedom Tower 'Junkyard'

Piles of trouble. Love him or hate him, one thing you must admit about
Donald
Trump
Donald Trump
: He’s not shy about sharing his opinions. And even the billionaire’s harshest critics might agree with what Trump had to say on Wednesday. He took to task the Ground Zero redevelopment team in general–and the widely disparaged polymorphic design for the so-called “Freedom Tower” in particular. A Reuters report quoted him as saying that the would-be replacement for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center “looks like a junkyard, a series of broken-down angles that don’t match each other. And we have to live with this for hundreds of years?” Trump touted an alternative design for a “taller, stronger more beautiful version” of the WTC, as he held forth in the lobby of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City. His eponymous building is one of many Trump structures disparaged by the critics. But most of Trump’s edifices are successfully built–unlike the Freedom Tower, the construction of which has hit yet another delay amid security concerns and public distaste for the ultra-modernist design. The chairman and chief executive of
Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts
, Trump has no official role in WTC plans. He said at a news conference that one of his proposed towers would be the tallest building on Earth, leveling off at 1,858 feet, versus the Freedom Tower’s symbolic 1,776 feet. “I only have the power of persuasion, but sometimes that can be very strong,” said the star of
General Electric
‘s
NBC hit, The Apprentice. He’s also the groomer of newest
Sirius Satellite Radio
personality , due to have her own Apprentice spinoff. Flooring the accelerator on that “power of persuasion,” Trump pulled out all the stops: According to Reuters, he declared the Freedom Towers design to be “the worst pile of crap architecture I’ve ever seen in my life.” It seems that billionaires like the First Amendment, too.